


Nostos

by SicklyRaven



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gen, Guitar lessons, Hurt/Comfort, Or more like the aftermath of tragedy, Tragedy, Unabashed gushing about The Power of Music
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-19
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-09-22 19:29:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17065706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SicklyRaven/pseuds/SicklyRaven
Summary: That’s the way Persephone's world works – no endings without new beginnings. Endless sorrow tangled with endless joy. She doesn’t know what to make of this mortal suffering, of the way it cripples even the strongest of men and never promises to heal.Maybe if she were Orpheus she’d try to understand it with a song. But she is not Orpheus, she doesn’t understand anything about music other than the way it makes her feel alive like only love and wine can.It dawns on her that there is no reason why it should be this way.“Will you teach me?”





	Nostos

_Spring_

Her first day back into the world, the air is exactly the way it should be – cold and alive.

It will change soon. Spring will turn it chilly, summer warm, warmer, suffocating, like a tedious lover’s embrace. And then it will be fall again.

Persephone doesn’t just know the cycle of the seasons, she feels it, deep down in her gut. In her bones. How could she not? She’s been observing it all since before mankind even had a word for “spring”. Back when the only two seasons were the one she spent with her lover, and the one she spent missing him. And even later, much later, when the clusters hung ripe and heavy from the grapevine and Persephone’s heart grew heavier still at the sight, because she knew her freedom was coming to an end. That it would be six long months of dark loneliness before she could taste the sweet juice of those grapes.

She thinks of Hades, careful arms around her as they danced, shy like he hadn’t been since that first day in her mother’s garden, and wonders if she’ll feel the same dread this fall.

Her first day back into the world, the air is exactly the way it should be – cold and alive. Everything else is off, though. There is no crowd to welcome her back, no laughter, no wine. No music. She might as well have stepped into the gloom of the deepest day of winter.

“Where is he?” she asks Hermes, because there’s only one mortal whose heartbreak could make even the birds stop singing.

Hermes smiles, in that way of his that betrays his sorrow more than tears ever could.

“Where is he, where is he. He’s where he always is these days,” he mutters, and his eyes fly to the railroad like a bird pushed by a wind much stronger than its wings. “I’m afraid your young protégé didn’t just lose his heart this past winter. He lost his mind, too.”

Persephone can picture him, bursting with music and life. Campfire light dancing on his skin, his fingers dancing on the lyre’s strings. People dancing all around him. She can picture it all perfectly because she’s done it so many times, during the winter. It’s the only way she can get through it.

And now she’s lost that too.

“But that’s not possible!” she protests, not really to Hermes but to… she isn’t even sure. Her husband. Fate. The frailty of men.

“Oh, it ain’t just possible, it’s also true,” Hermes says. “Go see for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

She believes him. That’s why she has to go see for herself.

* * *

He’s where he always is these days – right at the mouth of hell. He’s dirty, and his clothes are faded. He could almost disappear against the dull gray of the cave.

He still has his lyre.

That’s what Persephone finds most striking for some reason. After coming home to deafening silence, after Hermes’ words, she thought for sure the lyre had been destroyed. Or retired, at least, left in a forgotten corner of the house with only dust to cover its strings. Instead it’s at its usual place against the player’s chest, and it sings under his touch.

It was foolish of her to think that way. Orpheus couldn’t throw his lyre away in a burst of emotion any more than Persephone could cut off her own leg. His music is a part of him – but as such, it changes with him. Where it was bold, now it’s rueful. Where it was lively, it’s mournful. It doesn’t flicker like flames, doesn’t surge like the sunrise. It grieves, and it grieves, and nothing else.

“I don’t know why,” Persephone says, “but I was expecting this place to be the same.”

Orpheus keeps playing, keeps staring into the depths of the cave. Is he thinking of Eurydice’s embrace, forever lost in the darkness ahead of him? Or of her last desperate breath, the way it reverberated across the stones so they could hear it all the way to Hadestown?

A smile brushes his lips. Like Hermes’, it speaks of sorrow and loss. Unlike Hermes’, it doesn’t try to hide any of it.

“Even after everything?” he asks.

“Yes,” she admits.

That’s the way her world works – no endings without new beginnings. Endless sorrow tangled with endless joy. She doesn’t know what to make of this mortal suffering, of the way it cripples even the strongest of men and never promises to heal.

Maybe if she were Orpheus she’d try to understand it with a song. A rhythm so intoxicating that you’d wish to dance to it forever. A melody so complicated that no poet could ever play it to the end. But she is not Orpheus, she doesn’t understand anything about music other than the way it makes her feel alive like only love and wine can.

It dawns on her that there is no reason why it should be this way.

“Will you teach me?”

Orpheus looks at her – the first time since she came to find him – and he doesn’t understand. Persephone’s hand finds a soft place to land on the strings of his lyre, and for a moment the music dies. Everything around them is silence. Silence and the wind – a song of loneliness.

“Teach me how to play,” she says.

* * *

The first thing Persephone learns about music is that it is hard work.

She feels almost betrayed by the realization. She’s seen hard work, down in Hades, and it always comes with sweat and quick tempers. It’s dirty, and messy, and all-consuming, and it twists humans into a blasphemy of themselves, worn out creatures that follow the cycle of their own seasons – work and sleep and work and sleep. And she’s seen Orpheus play, drunk out of his mind and tired after a long summer day, and still wanting to play more, and not getting a single chord wrong. She’s seen him give his music to old wanderers and pretty girls, to raucous drunks and hardened kings, and never ask for anything in return but that they should sing along with him. How could she imagine that it takes as much work to play his notes as it does to keep Hades’ cursed machinery working in the Underworld?

Orpheus laughs when she tells him – the first time since last winter.

“The difference,” he explains, “is that this is worth the labor.”

And Persephone knows he’s right. She can feel it, deep and instinctive as she feels the seasons changing, and with no practice at all this time. She thought she loved music before, and she did in a way, but with every hesitant chord that comes out right, with every beautiful sound that she brings to life only with her hands and effort, she learns that the love she knew was only a muddy pool and there’s a whole deep ocean out there. It’s as if she’d been admiring a breathtaking painting for years, and suddenly realized she can step in it.

Flowers bloom, the days grow longer and warmer, and Persephone and Orpheus play and play and they don’t talk about the winter. She gets better, and so does he. At least Persephone thinks so. He starts bathing again, in a meander of the river just behind the cave. He lets Persephone bring him fresh clothes. And sometimes, sometimes when they’re playing he forgets his sorrow for a moment, and his fingers run wild on the lyre’s strings, horses capering in the fields after the first snowfall. Then he remembers he isn’t supposed to ever be happy again, and he reins them in.

Every day someone comes from the town and leaves a basket for the poet – bread, wine and cheese.

“They’ve been doing it all spring,” Orpheus says when Persephone asks him about it. “They still take care of me. Even though I have no more songs to gift them.”

Persephone thinks of Hadestown, of the way the workers have to earn their bread and cot with every second of their eternity, and her heart aches with pride.

“That’s how life should be,” she says, and they toast.

 

 

_Summer_

“Let’s write a new song,” Persephone says.

They’re in Orpheus’ old home – or his house, at least. He moved back a few days ago without telling anyone why. Maybe he felt bad about forcing the villagers to walk all the way to the mouth of hell and back every day just so he wouldn’t starve. Maybe he can’t see the shape of his lover in the darkness of the cave anymore, and he went to look for it in the bed they once shared.

Either way, they’re in Orpheus’ old house, and it’s pouring outside, the wind strong and warm and carrying the scent of summer and life, and Persephone opened the window so she could feel it and she felt like writing a brand new song.

But Orpheus shakes his head. “You should do it. I have nothing left to write about.”

Persephone looks out the window, at the trees shaking in the wind like they’re at the party of a lifetime, and tries not to admit how annoyed she is. “You know, just because she isn’t here it doesn’t mean she never existed.”

He comes to sit with her by the window. Hair ruffled by the wind, little drops of rain sprinkling his cheeks. He hasn’t looked so delicately human since he turned around that winter day.

“Do you like the rain?” he asks.

Persephone thinks about it. “I don’t like getting my clothes all wet and sticky and cold.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Yes,” she says. “I love the rain.”

Its scent, its music. The way it changes the world around it – nourishing. Destroying. Making life possible again and again. The way it makes Persephone feel, like the world is bigger and more magical than even a goddess could ever fathom. Like it’s okay to feel a little sad sometimes. The way it makes her heart long for something and doesn’t bother to tell her what it is. The way it makes her hair, her clothes all wet and sticky and cold.

All of it, she loves all of it.

“Do you think it would still rain if there was no life on earth?” Orpheus asks after a while.

“I think so,” Persephone says. “But it wouldn’t be the same.”

“I feel the same about my music,” he admits. “Without her it’s not the same.”

The storm is dying down, the wild impetus of the rain fading to a pizzicato cadence.

“Does it have to be the same?” Persephone asks. “Maybe it’s like the seasons. Maybe some things are meant to change.”

“Not this one,” Orpheus says.

They don’t play any more songs that day.

* * *

She starts playing for the village folk, the way he used to. Well, not the same way – she might be a goddess, and she might be practicing a lot, but she knows she will never understand music the way Orpheus does. She will never write songs that melt the hearts of kings and make flowers bloom in the dead of winter. Seeing how that ended, maybe it’s for the best.

But she plays for the village folk, and while it’s not like it used to be, it brings back music and laughter. It’s the blazing days of the second half of summer, when the world feels like a dream and life seems kinder and mortals dare to hope in spite of it all. There’s wine and campfires, and Persephone plays Orpheus’ old songs and some new ones, and they drink and they dance. It’s not like it used to be, but it’s the closest it’s ever been. And maybe seasons are the same, and Persephone just didn’t notice. Maybe their endless cycle doesn’t mean that things never change, it just highlights when they do.

She isn’t sure she likes this theory better.

Orpheus never joins in. Doesn’t sing, doesn’t play, doesn’t dance, doesn’t even listen. Doesn’t come out of the house at all, in fact. His fellow mortals have given up on him. They still bring him food, and cheer louder, toast more tearfully, when Persephone plays his songs, but they don’t try to change his mind anymore. It feels disrespectful to his grief, they say.

Persephone thinks it’s bullshit. What’s it to Eurydice if he spends the rest of his life hiding from the world? She isn’t here, she can’t see him laughing and living without her. She can’t get her heart broken by him again.

“You’re taking away the only chance she has to be in the world again,” Persephone tells him, and he flinches, because he’s done that before and he’s still paying the price.

“That’s not fair,” he says.

“It’s true.”

“Music won’t bring her back.”

“I know,” Persephone says. “But at least it won’t let her die a second time.”

“Do you think I don’t want to sing about her? That I wouldn’t do anything to make her immortal with my words?” Orpheus’ voice trembles, delicate and stubborn like a petal that won’t let the wind tear it from its string. “I can’t. I tried.”

And Persephone is a goddess, immortal and powerful, and she’s never been afraid, not even when Hades brought her down to the Underworld for the first time and she saw it all, the monstrous hound and the river of stones and the desperate, lonely souls, but she’s terrified when she asks: “Is this it, then? No more new songs?”

“No more new songs,” Orpheus confirms.

Something breaks inside her, and Persephone storms out of the house. She thinks she finally understands grief.

She plays for the villagers that night, like she’s always done this summer. But for the first time they seem too loud, too carefree. For the first time she doesn’t feel like playing the kind of music they feel like listening to. So she promises that she will play more tomorrow, and sends them on their way.

There’s an aching inside her that she’s never felt before. It’s a little like love but stronger, sadder, and more beautiful because of it. Persephone hates it. It’s longing and loss at the same time.

The really heartbreaking part is that she doesn’t know how to put it into music.

She tries. All night she sits around the smoky remnants of the campfire and sings and plays without an audience. She sings of spring and wine, of music, of Orpheus. Of Eurydice and snakes. Of hard choices and tears. Of her mother. Of her husband. Of birds and stars and the winter.

It’s not enough. Maybe Orpheus was right, maybe all the music in the world can’t bring back what you love. Not when the love was so familiar, so intimate that every attempt at recapturing it only feels like a violence to its memory. She sings about that. She sings her apology to Orpheus, because she didn’t get it but she gets it now – every new spring is just a reminder of the ones you lost, and just because there are fresh leaves on the trees it doesn’t mean that last year’s aren’t rotting in the ground. Because Persephone can play his songs but they mean something completely different to her than they did to him.

She’s all but tearing up when she finishes, and she hugs her lyre close for comfort. A hand snakes around her shoulders and pulls her close, her head resting against a heartbeat. She thinks Orpheus is crying.

“You were right,” he says after a while.

She looks at him, and yes, even in the darkness his eyes are red with sorrow. “Didn’t you hear the song? I wasn’t right. You were.”

Gently, Orpheus takes the lyre from Persephone’s hands and plays a chord on it. A new one.

“I can’t write songs about Eurydice,” he says, “but I can write songs for her. The way you sang this one for me.”

“I didn’t know you were listening.”

Orpheus laughs, embarrassed. “Who were you singing it for, then?”

Persephone thinks about it.

“… you.”

Who else? They both laugh this time.

“I can play them to her,” Persephone says. “All the songs you write. We can’t bring her back here, but I can bring your words down there.”

Orpheus hugs her, tighter than he ever has before, and for the first time since he came back from Hades he feels like himself again.

**Author's Note:**

> Find the line I shamelessly stole from Ghost Quartet ^^'


End file.
